The beginning
In one of his final communications to the Bitcoin community, Satoshi Nakomoto wrote that “I’ve moved on to other things.” What other things? I often wondered about this during the ~4 years that I was deep in the Bitcoin rabbit hole (jargon for “obsessed with Bitcoin”). During that time, it seemed like nothing could be more interesting or worthy of one’s time and attention.
I first became interested in Bitcoin in June 2018 when I heard Saifedean Ammous evangelize it on an episode of the Tom Woods Show podcast. At that time, I was fertile ground for such a pitch: an anarcho-capitalist filled with a righteous (or so I thought) anger about having to pay taxes to my coercive government overlords; a devotee of Austrian economics (i.e. internet Austrian), which I had learned from listening to Mises Institute lectures, podcast episodes, and halfheartedly attempting to read Mises’ tome “Human Action” (I think I made it through Part I); a graduate in computer science and overpaid code monkey.
Saifedean presented a compelling vision for sure: I could become wealthy by buying bitcoin; at the same time, we (“the Bitcoiners”) would be spearheading the movement to destroy governments by starving them of seignorage tax revenue, the lifeblood of the entire racket.
From that moment, I was completely hooked.
In the deep
It was a common talking point that to understand Bitcoin, you needed to understand technology, the history of money, game theory, political theory, psychology, etc, so I immersed myself in the Bitcoin Twitter scene, and read and watched everything I could about it. I regularly attended Bitcoin meetups where I met a bunch of very kind people that also happened to be as obsessed with Bitcoin as me. I even added a basic feature to the Bitcoin maximalist’s hardware wallet of choice (the Coldcard) so that users could view receive addresses directly on their device before possibly sending their life savings into a black hole.
I pronounced my faith on Twitter through frequent declarations of the memes popular in the Bitcoin community:
- “Bitcoin is money. Everything else is just credit”
- “Everyone buys bitcoin at the price they deserve”
- “Fix the money, fix the world”
- “Bitcoin fixes everything”
- “Have fun staying poor” — even at peak depravity, I don’t think I sunk low enough to say this last one to anyone.
I got into heated arguments with people (mainly leftists) on Twitter, dispelling their misguided notions that Bitcoin used too much energy, was destroying the environment, or served no purpose.
In real life, I took every opportunity to evangelize Bitcoin, believing that I possessed incredibly important information that could materially change the lives of my friends, coworkers, and family. Most important of all, with a single-minded focus, I sunk every single dollar I earned to accumulate as much bitcoin as I possibly could.
When COVID-19 happened, I saw it as a validation of my two main worldviews. Firstly, governments around the world uniformly went insane shutting down the world (and later mandating experimental vaccines) in order to control the spread of a disease that could have been managed successfully and humanely by prioritizing the safety of high risk populations… as they proceeded to lie to the public every step of the way. Secondly, the price of bitcoin skyrocketed in a short period of time over 1000%, which meant that I was well on the way to being a very rich man at an impressively young age.
And yet, I was miserable.
The cracks appear
One day in early 2019, I was spouting off to an uninterested coworker about how Bitcoin could not be killed, that it would survive anything, when he sardonically asked whether Bitcoin would survive the heat death of the universe. I was absolutely incensed because I had no snarky comeback to reply with. So I quickly put my coworker in the “he’ll just have to learn the hard way” box and resolved to never talk about Bitcoin with him again; however, I could never quite shake that snarky retort of his.
As time went on, I began to notice cracks in the Bitcoin dogma. For example, it was oft-repeated in the community that Bitcoin was on a predefined trajectory from a store of value, to a medium of exchange, and finally a unit of account. This unfalsifiable assertion was used to dismiss the obvious critique to the claim that Bitcoin was “the greatest money the world had ever seen”; namely, that its incredible volatility made use of Bitcoin as a generally accepted medium of exchange a laughable idea to anyone with a modicum of common sense. Even when clear arguments for bitcoin’s inherent volatility were put forth, it didn’t so much as make a dent in the prevailing ideology.
During long quiet walks in the woods that COVID-19 afforded, questions arose in my head that weighed heavily on my psyche. “What does it all matter anyway? If bitcoin went to $10,000,000/coin, I could buy anything that I wanted. Would I be happy then? If there were technical discoveries that scaled Bitcoin infinitely and made it perfectly private, what would it matter? If bitcoin destroyed every government in the world and ushered in a prosperous global libertarian utopia, would life have any more significance? Was I not going to die eventually ? Would not all of my friends, family, and descendants die eventually? Would not the entire Bitcoin blockchain and everything else with it come to an ignoble end with the heat death of the universe? By God, was my snarky coworker not right all along!?”
The gift of faith
Around this time, and not by coincidence, I bought a Bible, read the Gospels for the first time, and fell in love with Jesus Christ. I soon realized that God was the only possible solution to this existential crisis, and I wanted Christianity to be true because of the goodness and beauty of its teachings, but it went against my better judgement. Because of course every smart modern person knows that God is just a delusion, primitive ancient people were understandably misguided due to their lack of science, but thanks to Charles Darwin and The Science™, we can all stop believing in our magical Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Fortunately, by a stroke of Grace, I vaguely recalled an old tweet that a genuinely smart Twitter friend had sent explaining that ackchyually Christians do have rational justifications for their beliefs and so I should really look into William Lane Craig and Alvin Plantinga. So I did.
From there, my life seemed to change quite dramatically as if it had finally found its telos. My introduction to Reasonable Faith led me deeper into the Christian intellectual tradition, and the Aristotelian-Thomistic arguments for God’s existence convinced me that theism was in fact the most probable ultimate explanation for the true great mysteries of the universe (its sheer existence, life, consciousness), which I had never really bothered to pay attention to because I was too distracted by comparatively trivial nonsense like libertarianism or Bitcoin.
The changes weren’t merely limited to the realm of ideas. I soon proposed to my girlfriend, got married, and became a father; convinced of the truth of Catholicism in particular, I attended RCIA classes and entered into full communion with the Church of Rome at the next Easter Vigil.
My journey into the Catholic Church also gifted me insight into the insurmountable philosophical shortcomings of libertariansm especially when contrasted with the natural law system of ethics, which is a corollary of the Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics; nevertheless, I was able to preserve the good (i.e. the usefulness of free markets for economic prosperity), while discarding the bad.
Finally, it became clear to me that the Bitcoin community was nothing more than a way to take an interesting technology and undeniably one of (if not the) best investments of all time, and create an idol out of it.
Idolatry not only refers to false pagan worship. It remains a constant temptation to faith. Idolatry consists in divinizing what is not God. Man commits idolatry whenever he honors and reveres a creature in place of God, whether this be gods or demons (for example, satanism), power, pleasure, race, ancestors, the state, money, etc. Jesus says, “You cannot serve God and mammon.” Many martyrs died for not adoring “the Beast” refusing even to simulate such worship. Idolatry rejects the unique Lordship of God; it is therefore incompatible with communion with God. — The Catechism of the Catholic Church 2113
I like to think now that if Satoshi did indeed move on to other pursuits, it’s because he saw that there’s infinitely more richness in life than a “A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”, and summarily entered seminary to became a Catholic priest.
Afterword
I was inspired to write this piece after curiously checking what an old Bitcoin Twitter pal was writing about, only to find to my dismay that he and thousands of other people were still spending much of their waking life blabbering online like schizophrenics about Bitcoin, freedom, politics, privacy, etc.
While these happened to be the idols that I was drawn to, it became clear to me that they were in no way unique in the category of idol worship. The modern man & woman has found many false gods to worship: feminism, gender ideology, red pill ideology, open-borders, hating immigrants, child sacrifice, “owning the libs”, anarchism, Communism, socialism, National Socialism, Zionism, transhumanism, climate alarmism, artificial intelligence, race realism, etc. The modern high speed internet enables each of these idols to serve as an endless distraction and opportunity for humans to turn their immortal souls inwards on itself, and make true joy all but impossible.
If this article helps stem the tide of false worship in one person’s heart, it will have been well worth the effort.
P.S. An imbecile might try to erroneously dismiss the entire contents of this article by suggesting I must have become an altcoiner or that I’m just salty from having sold my bitcoin at a low point; however, in truth I have never owned or was interested in any altcoins, and I haven’t sold a single satoshi because I continue to view bitcoin as a good investment.
Further resources
- “Why should I believe God exists?” The Last Superstition by Edward Feser
- “Why should I believe that Jesus is God?” The Case for Jesus by Brant Pitre
- “Aren’t Creation and Evolution incompatible?” Video by The Thomistic Institute
- “Couldn’t life still have meaning without God?” Opening Statement by William Lane Craig
